Integrated Point-of-Care Diagnostics for Improved Treatment of Neonatal and Pediatric Patients

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The complete blood cell count (CBC) is the most commonly ordered diagnostic test in the ambulatory and emergency room settings. While there are multiple commercially-available point-of-care (POC) systems that measure individual components of a CBC, current systems do not provide the complete CBC but even more importantly, these POC systems do not integrate multiple additional assays using the same blood sample. For these reasons, the CBC continues to be performed almostexclusively in central laboratories using multiple milliliter-scaled blood samples. This offers a tremendous opportunity to provide the complete CBC along with other critical analytes for routine blood monitoring in the POC environment. Furthermore, idealsample volumes required to measure these critical laboratory values in children should come from a heel or finger stick, consistent with those amounts necessary for microfluidic technologies. This will be a tremendous benefit to pediatric patients b